If I run with this config, then the source and channel instance is created. If you add a print statement to ChannelProcessor.processEvent(), you'll see that the source is sending events to the channel. The source generates about 104 events, and then generates an additional one about every second... which is interesting, since the mem channel's default capacity is only 100 and there's no sink. When I do a runtime configuration by changing the the props file to this: